Inside Jamie Oliver’s Food Fight With L.A.

On an early January morning outside Independence Elementary in southeast Los Angeles, a man dressed as a red tomato handed out fliers to parents dropping off their children off at school.

The man in the tomato suit was celebrity chef Jamie Oliver. And he was stewing.

Mr. Oliver had recently relocated his family to Los Angeles from London to shoot the second season of his reality television show about healthy eating, “Food Revolution,” which premieres Tuesday evening on ABC. For the latest installment, Mr. Oliver had set his sights on refashioning school lunches in Los Angeles, home of the country’s second-largest public school system. Mr. Oliver has successfully changed lunch menus in Britain and in Huntington, West Virginia, where he filmed the first series of the reality show, which won an Emmy.

But things in L.A. didn’t go as planned, and Mr. Oliver unsheathed his knives.

Rather than dissecting school lunches, Mr. Oliver has spent the last few months battling Los Angeles school officials, who refused to grant him and his cameras access to any of their schools’ cafeterias after several bad experiences with previous reality TV shows and other outsiders trying to film inside schools. “This is not a boutique café operation,” outgoing LA Unified School District Superintendent Ramon Cortines told Mr. Oliver in a closed-door meeting of the school board in February. “I do not believe the school district should be a stage…and in the last several weeks you and your company have attempted to make the school district a stage.”

But those words didn’t stop Mr. Oliver from getting inside at least one school in Los Angeles.

Megan Chernin, wife of Peter Chernin and the chair of MLA Partner Schools—an organization that operates two public schools in Los Angeles in partnership with L.A.’s public school district, gave Mr. Oliver access to West Adams Prep, one of MLA’s schools, which lies west of downtown L.A. and opened in 2007. Although MLA schools are part of LA Unified, their leaders can make some decisions independently—which made Mr. Oliver’s visit possible, according to Ms. Chernin, who added that Mr. Oliver could work with students and teachers at West Adams as long as his work stayed within its curriculum—and out of its cafeteria, where school lunch is served and regulated by the District.

“The team was justifiably nervous about bringing on Jamie,” says Ms. Chernin, “but he wasn’t having any luck at the school district level, and it was an amazing opportunity for our kids that we just couldn’t turn down.” Ms. Chernin, who has previously spoken out about the obesity epidemic facing children living in the neighborhoods that the MLA schools serve, says she and others in education need to be more focused on nutrition in schools, both in terms of what schools serve as well as how they educate their students about eating more nutritionally-balanced meals with fruits and vegetables rather than just carbohydrates. “We need to address the food situation at schools,” she says. “If we don’t, we are failing our kids.”

The school board pushed back against Ms. Chernin and Mike McGalliard, president of MLA Partner Schools, eventually banning all reality television filming from schools and forcing Mr. Oliver to leave West Adams. “Jamie fancies himself as a crusading journalist,” says Robert Alaniz, director of communications for LAUSD. “But we just didn’t want reality television filming in our schools. We welcome him—sans cameras—to work with our menu committee to see if we can improve it. That invitation is still open.”

“I do get riled up a little bit because I don’t think the district tried hard enough to work with Jamie,” says Ms. Chernin. “They immediately thought of his work as a reality show that can come to no good end. The interference came out of fear.”

Still, some episodes of the coming program will show the time he spent with students at West Adams, which serves about 2,600 students—predominantly Latino—in a poor neighborhood of Los Angeles. Before the district forced him out, Mr. Oliver held several classes with students, including one with people suffering from diet-related diseases such as diabetes speaking to students about their illnesses and regrets about lifestyle choices. Many students grew emotional from the experience; some wept on camera. In another class, Mr. Oliver taught students how to cook healthier dishes without spending more, using inexpensive ingredients. And on another day, he cooked lunch for a large group of students. Nearly every student chose Mr. Oliver’s meal of chile and yogurt pops over school lunch.

Caleb Villanueva, a 17-year-old high school senior at West Adams who cooked with Mr. Oliver, says the biggest impression that Mr. Oliver left on him was that eating healthy doesn’t mean eating expensively.

“Jamie taught us that not only rich people can eat healthily,” he said before walking into cooking class. “In reality, anybody can eat healthy with just some thought—you don’t have to fry chicken in oil, you can put it in the oven and roast it with some herbs. When Jamie cooked for us, he really proved his point—you don’t need to spend a lot of time and money on food in order to make it healthy. You just need to be creative.”

“Everything I shot at West Adams was so eloquent, so moving,” says Mr. Oliver, “but the reality was that much what I saw there was also so wrong. These 17-year-olds leaving school do not have nearly enough basic information about food and how to make better choices,” he adds, noting that many students didn’t know basic food facts, such as where honey comes from or how many calories to consume in a day. “The next civil rights issue in this country should be proper access to food—and it should be a requirement that every child in America receives a food education.”

The one thing Mr. Oliver didn’t touch on during his visit at West Adams was the composition of L.A.’s school lunches, which he has criticized in the past for their inclusion of overly-sugar items like flavored milk.

But he drew attention to them in other ways. Earlier in the year, he and his crew filled an old school bus with 57 tons of white sand to show how much sugar the Los Angeles School District feeds its children each week from the flavored milk it provides in school lunches. He also invited students from L.A.’s public schools to gather on the promenade in Santa Monica to compete in a cook-off, which will be seen on the show. And he opened a temporary kitchen in East LA directly across the street from West Adams.

Meanwhile, Mr. Oliver’s crusade has spread to the Los Angeles community, spawning a series of protests against unhealthy food—and some more permanent changes. About 100 parents gathered on Valentine’s Day in downtown Los Angeles with gallon milk jugs filled with sugar to protest the district’s serving of flavored milk. And the American Heart Association and the California Endowment, along with Mr. Oliver’s foundation, are working to open five permanent community kitchens with healthy cooking classes, in cities such as Los Angeles and New York.

“Jamie did a tremendous job of awakening this effort on a grand scale,” says Ms. Chernin. “I hope his message gets out so other chefs can continue what he started here.”

And although Mr. Oliver still hasn’t gotten his crack at dismantling and rebuilding L.A.’s public school lunches, he did at least get some good material for television. In the first episode of “Food Revolution,” which is entitled “Maybe LA Was a Big Mistake” and debuts tonight, Mr. Oliver is seen clashing with school board officials and trying to find a way into their schools.

“If the school district was worried about conflict and drama, then they should have thought twice about their actions,” he says. “To be honest, 90 percent of what happened was created by them, written by them, produced by them.”